Bill Bratton Says he is Not Campaigning for Top NYPD Job

UPDATED | Former New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton isn’t “campaigning” for another chance at the position under Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, and hasn’t discussed it with the campaign team since the general election, he told reporters Tuesday morning.

Reuters

Bill Bratton in 2002, when he was Los Angeles police chief.

But Mr. Bratton, who has also led departments in Boston and Los Angeles, sure is talking a lot about how the nation’s largest police force should work, and how he’d do the job.

“Life is pretty good with no three o’clock in the morning phone calls,” Mr. Bratton said of his current professional responsibilities, which include owning a pair of companies, sitting on the boards of several others, and paid public speaking gigs around the world.

“At the same time,” Mr. Bratton went on, “there’s nothing like the public sector. Every day you get up and you can make a difference in — in the case of New York — eight million lives, and have a life that is of great significance, a life that matters.

“I think if you talk to Commissioner [Raymond] Kelly, the many years that he’s put into the position, he’ll tell you the same thing,” Mr. Bratton added. “There’s nothing quite like it.”

Mr. Bratton’s comments came before a panel discussion in SoHo organized by Transportation Alternatives and New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management about ways to prevent pedestrian deaths and injuries.

Moments later, he weighed in on the appropriateness of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies, and also suggested that the department could begin holding public meetings to discuss traffic statistics and road safety — a major departure from current procedure.

By turns Tuesday morning, Mr. Bratton explained how simple it would be to cut his ties to private business and reenter public service — “The only challenge there is giving up an awful lot of money,” he said — while warning that there had been no invitation from the incoming mayor.

“I haven’t been asked to get on the dance floor yet,” Mr. Bratton said.

The question is critical because Mr. de Blasio warded off attacks at the end of the mayoral campaign that suggested his election would reverse years of gains in public safety and lower crime rates.

And Mr. de Blasio was among the loudest voices calling for the curtailment of the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policing tactics, which have disproportionately targeted black and Latino New Yorkers.

Mr. Bratton discussed the steps he’d have to take if tapped for the top police job — such as put his companies into a blind trust

Mr. Bratton appeared to overstep when a reporter asked if he’d go along with Mr. de Blasio’s pledge to “end the stop-and-frisk era.”

“That’s not his goal; he has never said that,” Mr Bratton said, going on to say Mr. de Blasio had instead focused on reforming department procedures. But Mr. de Blasio’s campaign did repeatedly use that phrase, including in its most famous advertisement, featuring the candidate’s son Dante, who said his father would “end a stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color.”

Lis Smith, a spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, said, “Every name that’s out there is nothing more than speculation at this point. The transition is focused on identifying a commissioner with the experience and leadership to effectively run the NYPD, keep New Yorkers safe and who is committed to bringing police and community back together.”

Mr. Bratton also carved some space between himself and Mr. Kelly on the issue of stop-and-frisk.

“This was one crazy city in the early 1990s,” Mr. Bratton said. “This area down here was a no man’s land at the time. It did require assertive policing but it was done constitutionally and respectfully. Same thing in Los Angeles. Los Angeles was an even tougher environment than here. So it can be done, you can have law, order and a respectful environment at the same time.”

Asked whether the stop and frisk procedures used by the department in the Bloomberg administration were constitutional, Mr. Bratton said, “The mayor and the police commissioner certainly argue that. There have been others who argue against that. Where does the actual reality lie? Probably somewhere in the middle.”

Over the weekend, Letitia James, who will succeed Mr. de Blasio as the city’s public advocate, endorsed Philip Banks, the NYPD’s chief of department, to succeed Mr. Kelly as the top-ranking police official in the city. Standing just where Mr. Bratton had briefed reporters on Tuesday morning, Ms. James reiterated her endorsement but also praised Mr. Bratton, and said the final decision lies with Mr. de Blasio anyway.

Mr. Bratton did not directly criticize Mr. Kelly on Tuesday, and at one point praised the decline in violent crime rates that occurred during Mr. Kelly’s tenure. But the event Mr. Bratton was attending was itself a rebuke of the NYPD under Mr. Kelly: the panel discussion dealt with “closing the enforcement gap” to prevent deaths and injuries to pedestrians and non-drivers in the city.

Mr. Bratton briefly addressed the group, and said there is “room for improvement” in the police department’s enforcement of speeding and other driving offenses.

The former chief agreed with some members of the panel that it would require a change in the culture of the police department to create greater focus on stopping dangerous driving and cutting fatalities on the streets — a campaign pledge of Mr. de Blasio’s.

“That’s a pretty easy thing to do,” Mr. Bratton said. “It’s a matter of just directing resources onto this issue.” He and other speakers said increasing the use of technologies like speed and red-light cameras could also allow the police to step up driving enforcement while leaving time and energy for other priorities.

NYPD Spokesman John McCarthy responded by saying, “Over the past decade, we have driven down traffic fatalities by 30 percent, and the last six years have been the safest in more than a century, recording the fewest traffic fatalities.”

Mr. Bratton also got a taste of what it could feel like for the person who is tapped to align Mr. de Blasio’s campaign pledges on topics like street safety with the reality of a department that has its own customs and ways of operating. At one point in his talk Tuesday morning, Mr. Bratton drew a distinction between traffic fatalities and crime.

“Traffic fatalities are crime,” barked Charles Komanoff, an economist and transportation expert, from the second row.